Rocking On Against Hate: SPLC senior fellow uses music and activism to
oppose right-wing extremism
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Esther Schrader | Read the full piece here
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Friend,
It was 1991, the height of the vibrant alternative music scene in the
Pacific Northwest, and a young Black punk rocker by the name of Eric
K. Ward was worried.
He had reason to be. Police had warned that a group of neo-Nazi
skinheads was threatening violence at a Eugene, Oregon, concert of
Fugazi, a popular punk band known for pushing back against the growing
terror being unleashed by white supremacist groups in the region.
But instead of providing a security presence at the concert hall
- as the musicians had requested - the Eugene Police
Department pressured the music club management to cancel the concert.
The incident, Ward recalled, crystallized his understanding of just
how far this country has fallen short of the ideal of liberty and
justice for all.
"Up until that time, I mostly saw Eugene as a pretty liberal
kind of haven," Ward said. "But this was a wake-up call
that neo-Nazis didn't even have to show up, like they had done
at clubs and shows in Los Angeles. To shut our scene down they merely
had to make the threat, and the community found itself
immobilized."
At that moment, the dreadlocked ska-punk singer - who today has
become a prominent leader against hatred and extremism - began
to seek a better way. Bringing together a rainbow of vulnerable
communities living under the threat of organized bigotry, he began
gradually, step by step, to launch more sophisticated efforts at
change.
Ward walked into meetings of some of the earliest gatherings of
America's emerging "alt-right
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" to try to reason with them. He traveled by bus across
thousands of miles to help establish hundreds of anti-hate task forces
in small towns and big cities. He worked with law enforcement on
strategies to handle extremists.
And as he began to learn about like-minded community-based efforts
around the country focused on human rights, he eagerly reached out to
several organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center,
adopting their playbooks for countering organized hate.
Today, Ward's dreadlocks are gone, but his activism still
resonates. A senior fellow with the SPLC's Intelligence Project
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since April 2020, Ward this month will receive the Civil Courage
Prize, a human rights award that recognizes steadfast resistance to
evil at great personal risk.
"I don't take bullying very well, and I always take the
side of those who I think are being bullied," Ward said.
"And so I think what happened for me is, first, folks are
messing with the music that I love. Then, what others helped me figure
out was, this wasn't just a set of individual behaviors, this
was an ideology. And it was a political strategy to derail the
aspiration for a multiracial and multicultural society, one that was
steeped in actually trying to overcome challenges, not using those
challenges as an excuse to descend into chaos and bigotry.
That's really what galvanized me."
READ MORE
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